Australian

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Australian is a macro family first proposed by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906 , which includes several language families from Southeast Asia and the Pacific region . A generally accepted evidence of a genetic relationship between the languages ​​in question has not yet been produced. The macro family is therefore only recognized by a few researchers as a genetic unit .

The components of the Australian

According to Merritt Ruhlen 1991, the Australian macro family consists of the following components:

The four components are generally recognized language families , the structure of which can be found in the respective articles. Ruhlen sees - based on a suggestion by Joseph Greenberg - a somewhat closer relationship between Tai-Kadai and Austronesian, which he therefore combines into the Austro-Tai unit.

Historical development of the Australian hypothesis

The genetic relationship between the languages ​​of Southeast Asia and the Pacific remained largely in the dark until the middle of the 19th century, after which the picture was only hesitantly illuminated. It took almost 100 years for today's regional language families to be established and classified. One obstacle on the way to the correct classification was the long accepted relationship of the Tai and Hmong-Mien languages with Sino- Tibetan , which only gradually turned out to be incorrect (and can still be found in popular works today).

Wilhelm Schmidt

1906 hit Father Wilhelm Schmidt , the Austro Asiatic as a summary of the Mon-Khmer languages with the Munda languages before (the latter had until then Dravidian held), named the Malayo-Polynesian languages in Austronesian languages to and passed both the new larger unit Austric languages together. However, as far as we know today, Schmidt made several mistakes: he classified the Austronesian Cham languages ​​as Austro-Asian, the Austro-Asian Vietnamese still belonged to Sinotibetic , and the independent Tai and Hmong-Mien languages ​​also remained Sinotibetan for him.

In a later essay from 1930, Schmidt suggested that Japanese can be counted among the Australian languages. He mainly relied on the similarities in the vocabulary between Japanese and the Austronesian languages ​​that he found. However, the classification of Japanese as an Australian language was not pursued; only the assumption of a relationship between Japanese and the Austronesian language family was occasionally discussed by some linguists (e.g. Benedict 1975).

Paul Benedict

In the early 1940s, Paul Benedict began studying the Southeast Asian languages. He recognized the Kadai group in southern China and correctly added them to the Tai languages, which now formed a Tai Kadai group. He also found commonalities between Tai-Kadai and Austronesian and summarized them in a macro grouping, which he named "Austro-Tai". Furthermore, he temporarily accepted Schmidt's Australian as the parent language family of Austro-Tai, and also expanded it - with reservations - to include the Hmong-Mien languages:

Australian after Benedict 1942

  • Australian
    • Hmong Mien
    • Austro-Asian
      • Mon-Khmer
      • Viet Muong
      • Munda
    • Austro-Tai
      • Tai-Kadai
      • Austronesian

As with Schmidt's smaller approach, Benedict's Greater Australian was heavily criticized. The evidence for this large grouping is generally viewed as very weak. In 1975 Benedict gave up the Australian hypothesis completely in favor of an expanded form of the Austro-Tai hypothesis.

Merritt Ruhlen

Merritt Ruhlen assumes - based on the work of Greenberg - in his much-cited work A Guide to the World's Languages from 1991 from the comprehensive Australian based on Benedict 1942, which he divides as follows:

Australian after Greenberg 1980 and Ruhlen 1991

  • Australian
    • Hmong Mien
    • Austro-Asian
    • Austro-Tai
      • Tai-Kadai
      • Austronesian

Current status

Although widespread through Ruhlen, the Australian macro family could hardly establish itself. The vast majority of researchers again assume that there are four separate language families in Southeast Asia. An important contribution to the topic is the article Far Eastern Languages (1991) by Søren Egerod .

One of the main problems in clarifying the Australian hypothesis to this day is the widely differing level of research into the individual language families and, in particular, the lack of a reconstruction of a proto-language . While the proto-languages ​​of Austronesian and Tai-Kadai could be reconstructed to a certain extent, a reconstruction of the proto-languages ​​is still largely missing for the Austro-Asian and especially the Hmong-Mien languages.

literature

  • Merritt Ruhlen: A Guide to the World's Languages. Arnold, London 1991.
  • Wilhelm Schmidt: The Mon Khmer peoples, a link between the peoples of Central Asia and Austronesia. Brunswick 1906.
  • Wilhelm Schmidt: The language families and language areas of the world. Winter, Heidelberg 1926.
  • Paul K. Benedict: Thai, Kadai and Indonesian: A New Alignment in Southeastern Asia. American Anthropologist 44, Washington (DC) 1942.
  • Paul K. Benedict: Austro-Thai - Language and Culture. HRAF Press, 1975.
  • Søren Egerod: Far Eastern Languages. In: Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell: Sprung from Some Common Source. Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages. Stanford University Press 1991.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Schmidt, Wilhelm (1930). "" The relations of austrischen languages to the Japanese. " Vienna's contribution to the cultural history and linguistics . 1 : 239-51.